Environmental news feed

Police in Vietnam have detained prominent environmentalist Hoang Thi Minh Hong, known as Hong Hoang, on tax evasion charges frequently used against critics of the government’s environmental policies. Hong, who was taken into custody on May 31, is an Obama Foundation Scholar and founded the Center of Hands-on Action and Networking for Growth and Environment

“South Africa loses between 1,000 and 2,000 pangolins each year to fence electrocutions. This far overshadows the number of individuals that are illegally poached and trafficked,” says Dr Darren Pietersen, one of South Africa’s leading pangolin researchers. There are eight pangolin species worldwide, with four occurring in Asia and four in Africa. Of the four

SÃO PAULO — On Tuesday, Brazil’s Lower House of Congress overwhelmingly voted and approved a bill to restrict the legal recognition of Indigenous territories throughout the country. Among many changes, the bill 490/2007 establishes a time frame — marco temporal in Portuguese — that only recognizes Indigenous land rights if they were living there or

Researchers analyzed never-before-used satellite data to calculate how much carbon is stored in protected areas worldwide.

In May, a commission of experts appointed by the governor of Nigeria’s Bayelsa state released its long-awaited report on the impact of oil production on the small riverine state. The report detailed years of oil spills, gas flaring, and other pollution from facilities owned by companies like Shell and Eni, with devastating impacts on biodiversity

SINGAPORE — It’s been a hectic few weeks for Kevin Marriott. On a humid May morning in Singapore, he shuttles between two locations at the city’s Windsor Nature Park. At one site, he looks on as a team of scientists and aviation experts get ready to launch a fleet of drones to gather information about

When it comes to mapping green cover, it’s easy to miss the trees for the forest. New research suggests that there are a lot of missed trees: almost 30% of all tree cover in Africa may be outside of forests, according to an analysis published in Nature Communications. This research allows us to look “at

A renewable energy project that received millions of dollars in climate financing from the Indonesian government is bulldozing rainforest in the nation’s Papua province, according to a new article by a London-based journalism nonprofit. Indonesia’s Medco Group, which owns the project — a biomass power plant and wood plantation — has said it will clear

The Brazilian Congress approved a series of actions to dismantle the president’s ambitious environmental agenda, including attacks on Indigenous people's rights and stripping powers of ministers.

Why do people clear forest? To anybody who has lived on the forest frontier, the answer is as simple as it is obvious: it is essential to the livelihoods of the region’s inhabitants. In some cases, it may be to grow food to feed a family but, more often, people clear forest to generate wealth

Indigenous territories with secure land rights not only reduce deforestation inside their lands in the Brazilian Amazon, but also lead to higher secondary forest growth on previously deforested areas, says a new study. This new report, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is off the back of multiple studies in recent years

The underwater world continues to surprise us with new discoveries across the world, both in the seas and freshwater ecosystems. Watch deep-sea footage from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where a team of scientists discovered life thriving around hydrothermal vents hot enough to melt lead. Meanwhile, in Kerala, India, scientists discovered a new-to-science blind fish. The brightly-colored

Xamã is a year old. In August 2022, the jaguar cub was found all by himself, extremely malnourished and feeble, on private land in the municipality of Sinop, in Brazil’s Mato Grosso. His mother was not around. She’d probably died, or the two may have been separated by a large fire nearby. Rescued by environmental

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government is considering applying an international treaty to fight illegal fishing at more ports across the country, to gain better oversight of the all-important fishing industry. Indonesia is a signatory to the 2009 Port State Measures Agreement (PSMA), the first binding international treaty to specifically target illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU)

SILINGE, Nepal — On a sunny afternoon, 70-year-old Dhanikram Praja squats on top of a hillock overlooking the lush green rows of trees dotting his farm, distinct from his other trees, which have already shed their leaves. The chiuri (Diploknema butyracea or Indian butter tree) saplings he planted three decades ago on his farm in

The Amazon, home to the largest tropical forest on the planet, is an irreplaceable natural asset with enormous biodiversity and a critically important component in global carbon and water cycles. The Pan Amazon, which includes the full watershed and the rainforests of the Guiana Shield, is a geopolitical territory spanning nine nations that have been

JAKARTA — Subsidiaries of some of the world’s biggest palm oil companies have been found guilty by Indonesia’s anticompetition watchdog of restricting sales of cooking oil amid acute shortages last year. Indonesia is the world’s biggest producer of palm oil, the most widely used vegetable oil for cooking oil, yet consumers across the country faced

Thirty-five years ago on a sweltering April night, Enrique Cárdenas, a biology and natural sciences teacher, watched El Papantón burn. The mountain, which stands 1,939 meters (about 6,360 feet) tall, dominates the horizon of the Mexican community of Juanacatlán. Cárdenas gathered his co-workers, friends, neighbors and relatives to climb the mountain and put out the

DHAKA — Authorities in Bangladesh have decided to install nylon net fencing in the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest, to tackle human-tiger conflicts and protect both communities and the endangered big cats. The move is part of the Bangladesh Forest Department’s three-year Sundarbans Tiger Conservation Project, launched in March 2022, and is aimed at

Across the world, around 18,500 marine protected areas have been set up to protect sea life and the ecosystem services that oceans supply, covering about 8% of the sea surface. But according to a new study, some might not work as well in reality as they do on paper. The research published in Marine Policy